Drawing Center director Brett Littman helms an institution that is anything but predictable: Exhibitions this year have included an examination of the cooking philosophies of Ferran Adrià, as well as a group show organized around Colson Whitehead’s novel “The Intuitionist.” Currently, the non-profit is hosting the textile-focused “Thread Lines,” on view through December 14. ARTINFO caught up with Littman during last week’s Blouin Creative Leadership Summit to discuss the nuances of creative thinking.
During the BCLS panel discussion you talked about the now-touring “Ferran Adrià: Notes On Creativity,” and mentioned how the Spanish chef fostered a creative environment in the kitchen. As an institutional director who is doing things that are both creative and administrative, do you aim for the same sort of environment at the Drawing Center?
I come at this field not as an art historian, but from the world of philosophy and poetry. And the way I’ve tried to run the Drawing Center is to make it like a think tank. I’m not dogmatic; I’m looking at drawing in the broadest possible way, and maybe I’ve been accused of not showing a lot of drawing in the seven-and-a-half years I’ve been director. I do have art historians as curators. I say to them when I come in: I’m hiring people who have a broad base of knowledge, and I prefer them to be generalists. They should try to present shows that are totally outside of their wheelhouse. I’ve tried to create an environment in which the dialogue around the institution’s mission is creative and dynamic. We don’t think of our programming in a linear way — it’s more spherical. Would I like to do something [like Adria’s restaurant, El Bulli, did] where the Drawing Center is only open six months, and then we go off and have a long research and development session? That’d be great, but I don’t know whether there’s any kind of possibility to make that work in the non-profit environment.
One of the topics that came up during the BCLS was this idea of research as a basis for making. Obviously there are some people whose practice is very research-driven, whereas others are still abiding by the concept of a spontaneous gesture. I assume you’ve worked with both types of artists.
To be honest, I don’t think pure creativity can come out of not knowing something. I’m a little perplexed when I visit young artists who have the idea that they’ve recreated Modernism, but they don’t actually understand what Modernism is. In order to be creative you have to have a foundation, to understand what came before you, to build on that and analyze it. You have to internalize. From my own experience, in order to become a poet, I had to relearn language. I had to abandon all conception of what I thought the written word was. Which meant that sometimes I just wrote a poem that was one “e” on a page, and that was useful: I got to build back a whole new system in a way that was free of other baggage and other kinds of predetermined ways of thinking. Did Picasso simply paint a painting out of his head, and it was a masterpiece? Yes, but Picasso understood many things about art history and culture. And so I think the real creative people are the ones who are grounded in what came before them, and they understand both how to manipulate and change that. The kind of things that last for a long time are generally part of that continuum. I’m a bit wary when someone says, “I’ve had this huge breakthrough in the studio, and I’ve invented Abstract Expressionism!” The other thing that’s interesting is what I call the unconscious influence: when there’s an artist or a movement that falls outside of history and discourse, and all of a sudden other artists have picked [those ideas] up. Maybe it’s the zeitgeist. Creativity is also about this network of knowledge. You have to be intellectually curious. The way that I’ve been creative in my field is that I read something and that leads me to something else, and that leads me over here, and over here, and all of a sudden I’m 25 steps away from where I’ve started, I’ve made an arc and covered a lot of ground. That’s what drives me to do what I do, and maybe that’s why the Drawing Center can be a place that’s a little more flexible.
You asked your fellow panelists this question as well: Do you think creativity can be taught?
I hope that creativity is something that can be introduced at a later age. For me, personally, it started at an early age. I blame my parents. I went to school to be a doctor, but I grew up in New York and went to the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Brooklyn Museum, and MoMA. My dad was a photographer who became a teacher; that’s what I grew up with. Then later, I understood Sol LeWitt because I studied philosophy. I’m hoping that people who come to the Drawing Center are in other kinds of fields, not just the art world, and that they’re inspired.
To be honest, I’ve had more profound experiences with music than I have with visual art — that transcendent experience listening to something that puts you in a totally different place. I can’t say I’ve ever cried in front of a painting. But with the visual arts, it’s this idea of leverage: You need to be able to look at your assumptions and leverage them. Maybe that’s what creativity is, and I hope that’s what museums can offer, rather than someone comes and looks at a show and learns a bit about history. Maybe creativity is about jiggling the wires a little and creating a little more room for error.
